Presented in Jun, 2013 at the Hacknight organized by HasGeek

1. Data Visualization
For Business
~Pallav Nadhani

2. Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that
90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two
years alone.
"The ability to take data - to be able to understand it, to process
it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it - that's
going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades― ~ Hal
Varian, Google's chief economist

3. Data visualization is a multi-disciplinary recipe of
art, science, math and technology.

4. Data Visualization is the visual display of
measurable quantities using
• Points, Lines & Curves
• A co-ordinate system
• Numbers
• Shading
• Color
• Symbols
to serve a clear purpose
• to understand data
• to substantiate a hypothesis
• to discover from data

5. Types of data visualization
• Explanatory: Based around a specific and focused narrative
• Exploratory: Aim to create a tool for user to discover
• An exhibition of self expression. Ornamentation of data as art

6. Steps for effective business data
visualization
• Know your audience and their need for visualization
• Choose the right visualization type and style
• Explore ways of enhancing it

7. Know your audience
• What role is this information for? C-level, Analysts, Operational guys
• What department does he belong to? Sales, marketing etc.
• What metric will help him achieve his goals?

8. Abstraction of data by role
• C-level: Use information to keep track of health of business. Need
strategic and high level view with focus on long term and macro data.
Simple summary and indicators suffice, and they do not need real-time
data.
• Analyst: Focus on getting value out of data. Need query driven
analysis, detailed data with precision, and focus on trends and co-relations.
• Operational guys: To complete task in hand. Need information to focus on
current status, issue & event driven (alerts, spikes, trouble). Real-time data
here is useful.

9. Data required by department
• Sales: Leads, conversions, Average value per sale, Closure time
• Marketing: Visits, Acquisitions, CPC, CPM, Awareness
• Network & IT: Issues, tickets, lead time, open cases, downtime
• HR: Attrition rate, interview closure rates and time
• Customer Support: Number of tickets, turnaround time, satisfaction rating

10. Role + department + goal derives metric
• In each department, the data to be viewed changes by role
• In customer support:
• Support Executive sees his number of tickets, his turnaround time etc.
• Head of customer support sees total tickets by department or by issue
type, and turnaround time
• CEO sees customer satisfaction index
• In sales:
• Sales associate see their number of leads, target allotted, and target
covered
• Sales Team Heads see number of leads for team, conversion
ratio, closure rates, turnaround time, leaderboard
• VP, Sales sees pipeline of all team members, revenue by
teams, geographical distribution of revenue, channel distribution
• CEO sees projected revenue vs actual revenue

11. When deciding what metric to visualize…
• Ensure that metric helps drive a business goal. Avoid vanity metrics
• Use simple metrics that everyone can understand, and act on
• Just because you've some data doesn't mean you've to use it all

12. 7-step framework for business metrics
1. Define company goals – short term (6-12 months) & long term (36
months)
2. What are the measures to determine if you have met your goals?
(Financial and Non-financial key result indicators)
3. What activities should you undertake to reach the goals?
4. From all the activities that you could undertake, now select the 20% of
activities that have the biggest impact on your goals.
5. Who is responsible for seeing that top 20% activities are carried out?
6. How are you going to measure if your most important activities are being
carried out correctly?
7. Of all your indicators (Key result and Key performance) that are listed
above determine which ones:
a) Are already being measured / reported
b) Can be measured (data is available)
c) Can not yet be measured (data not available)

13. Now that you know your audience, data and goals,
let’s visualize…

14. A good visualization would…
• Harness the powerful visual function of the human brain
• Be tailored to the medium of delivery and skill-set of audience
• Use a design choice supports the comprehension of the data, and increases
data-ink ratio

15. Our visual function in the brain is extremely fast
compared to the cognitive function.
80% of the brain is dedicated to visual processing.

16. Maximizing pre-attentive processing
• Visualizations are rendered in 3 dimensions – x, y and z
• Use the z-axis to maximize pre-attentive processing by changing the color,
size, shape or shading of the object

17. The world is not full of statisticians. Many of us would
like a quick glance just to get a good idea of something.

18. Types of data representation - basic
Single figure
$123,344
(This week)
Single figure with historical context
$123,344
(This week) 18% up
Comparison of data
0
20
40
60
John Sam Mark Harry
Number of closed
deals
Transition of data
0
200
400
600
800
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun
Leads per month
Composition of data
Number of employees
SF
LA
LV
NY

19. Innumerable types of visualizations are possible. As
simple or as complex as you want them.

20. Communicate more than data to user.
Do not leave the processing to user.
The worst visualizations make you think more than
looking at a raw data table itself.

21. Credit: http://www.slideshare.net/destraynor/designing-data-visualisations-dashboard-in-web-applications

22. Credit: http://www.slideshare.net/destraynor/designing-data-visualisations-dashboard-in-web-applications

23. Number of employees
SF
LA
LV
NY
34
23
3
23
Number of employees
SF
LA
LV
NY
Always use labels & legends on pie chart

24. Arranging data in order makes it easy

25. Cut down distractions

26. Use dotted lines for projections

27. And effective annotations to highlight/segregate

28. Use interactive features to increase data-ink ratio

29. Use drill-downs for detailed data, and communicate such
interactivity to user

30. Enhance tabular data with colors and shapes

31. For data with 3 related dimensions, use bubble
or heatmap charts

32. Compact charts can condense a lot of info

33. Aim to provide unified experience across devices
On a PC/Mac On iPhone

34. Can use symbolic representations for real-life objects

35. 06

36. 06
Credits
• http://www.slideshare.net/jess3/data-visualization-meets-visual-
storytelling
• http://www.slideshare.net/trisnadi/infographics-data-visualisation
• http://www.slideshare.net/GeneralAssembly_SF/data-visualization-
16265937
• http://www.slideshare.net/destraynor/designing-data-visualisations-
dashboard-in-web-applications

37. 06
Thank you